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Dollars To Pounds: Lightspeed You Black Emperor

“I’m glad you all came and didn’t stay at home watching Mark Ronson on the Brit Awards,” said Lightspeed Champion Dev Hynes. While his mates Arctic Monkeys collected their Brits trophies dressed as sozzled country gents, Dev completed his transformation from day-glo Dalston scenester to sensitive country troubadour on stage at Camden’s Dingwalls.

“I wrote all the songs before I knew I was ever going to record them,” he explained to me backstage while slurping pineapple juice. “If I knew people were going to hear them I probably would have held back a bit more. I did consider changing some lyrics. But… it’s cool. It’s weird writing songs now because, knowing they might be on an album someday, they’ve either become overly literal or completely full of ridiculous metaphors.”

Before launching into “Midnight Surprise,” Dev lead his band through a ridiculous version of the “Star Wars Theme” (you can see them do it in Nottingham here). Clearly it was a long-held geek fantasy. “Yeah, it’s really fun to do that,” said Dev. “This is actually the first gig of the tour where I haven’t talked about Star Wars on stage. That’s probably a good thing.”

What Dev would like to warn us about, however, is the imminent potential of time-travelling scientists visiting us from the future. “The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s biggest atom smasher under a mountain in Switzerland. When it opens in May it’s almost 80 percent certain that it’s going to create lots of miniature black holes. There were some theories saying it was going to kill the world. Turns out it’s not. But what they’ve also worked out is that it could be the world’s first time machine, which means we then become Year Zero for people visiting us from the future. It’s crazy. Basically we could start meeting people from the future shortly after May 2008.”

And with that mindfuck, we leave Dev to chill with his Mum, and other people who didn’t get invited to the Brits. If you want to geek out some more with Dev, though, watch him talk about his favourite
comic books in the video above.